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I think what you meant was that there is a huge gap between spoken languages and programming languages, feature wise. To make the argument more convincing, don't use English. The grammar is ambiguous. Lojban, a created language, is not. It is being used as a spoken language (though it's not very popular yet). Still, it is being used very differently from a computer program in a fundamental way. One of the major issues is the concept of object definitions. Object-oriented languages have a very specific meaning for what an "object" is, while spoken languages do not. Rather than creating a specification for what data and functions an object contains, spoken languages group objects by properties. Ambiguity aside, it's a problem of whether you're defining it top-down, or bottom-up. Prototypes are closer to the way we use language for object definitions, but it's still not quite the same. Another issue is how the language is used. A random portion of the source code is completely non-sensical to a computer, while a random paragraph of a book can still be meaningful. The portion of the source code could make sense to a programmer, maybe enough to reconstruct enough of it, but no computer can process it. So, to go back to the original point, programming languages and spoken languages are both supposed to convey ideas. Spoken languages do a much better job, hands down. OP used length as a rough measure, but the idea is valid. The question is how can we make computers understand spoken languages in a meaningful way. Answer that, and you'll have a better programming language. |